COLLABORATION:
OU ALLONS NOUS?
Translation: Has a new paradigm of collaboration emerged that violates—or maybe just ignores—Brooks’ Law?

    
  by Nancy Cohen    
             
    "A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers…. Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds." —Frederick Brooks Jr.  
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  There does not seem to be any credible way that Open Source collaboration proponents can agree with Brooks’ Law, named after Frederick Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month. For Brooks, only with a minimum number of contributors can something of quality be produced: "Conceptual integrity" is borne of one mind, "or a very small number of agreeing resonant minds."

Brooks was writing all that about software systems projects in the mid-1970s. For those who have witnessed the Open Source collaborative spirit and the growth of Internet technologies for communicating, Brooks’ Law tempts one to conclude that laws are made to be broken, in all business areas.

In the ever-onward quest for ways to work smarter in this newer age of Internet technologies and Open Source achievements, signs are starting to show of a shift from knowledge management to knowledge sharing, the strategy found in SuSE's Openexchange. Meanwhile, the key focus of interest, ‘How well can I manage all this content’ is turning into ‘How actively, how efficiently, can I contribute to creating excellent content?’

Internet technologies as a whole have opened up a new frontier of communicative methods and techniques that involve large numbers of people creating content, improving on content, and updating documents. If there’s one buzz word that would actually be useful for 2003, it is collaboration. Joseph Cothrel, frequent writer and speaker on topics related to online community in e-business, is one of the IT practitioners and researchers who see further growth ahead.

Back in 1997, as a research director for Andersen, Cothrel began working on a sponsored study of how companies were using on-line communities for large-scale collaboration. “I realized there was so much happening in this field,” he says. There was, and still is.

Alongside the historic impact of Open Source, Cothrel, who is now Vice President of Research at Participate.com, notes that business use of collaborative techniques is growing up as network technologies evolve. "The worth of Internet technologies is no longer confined as helping us to do business faster, cheaper. Internet technologies are enabling us to work in ways we were not able to do before."

Cothrel says that collaboration has moved out of what he calls the “backwaters of engineering and manufacturing” and into main-line business activities. Cothrel, like other information researchers, is looking at how this momentum in collaboration will affect businesses practices.

Companies that have looked at collaboration as just “tools for teams” should think again, asserts Cothrel. There are new opportunities on the collaborative landscape whether in the form of small-group collaborations or large-group level collaboration.

Open magazine asked Cothrel to expand: “Think about how these Internet technologies have the potential of tapping customers’ discretionary efforts, efforts that are not being claimed right now. Think of the advantages gained when customers solve other customers’ problems.”

Beside leveraging customer involvement, Cothrel sees collaboration as a way to unleash employee talent, too. Collaborative technologies make one ask, “Can we coax greater employee efforts by finding some new pivotal points of common value?”

 

Building Communities of Practice
One information expert tracing how organizations organize knowledge is Andreas Neus, consultant with IBM Germany. Neus has become particularly interested in virtual communities and information quality in the context of the Internet. In this interview, Neus turns to where all this talk about collaboration is going in corporations today—and where it can go.

There’s a lot of talk at IBM Global Services about evolving ‘communities of practice.” How does this fit within the concept of knowledge management?

NEUS: Over the last few years, knowledge management has been moving away from "How do I store and manage documents?" towards “How can I facilitate communication and knowledge sharing between employees?” Virtual Communities of Practice bridge time and space, while facilitating a critical step in the knowledge cycle: Turning implicit knowledge in people's heads into explicit information that can be shared with peers. I think that we are still at the beginning of a revolution in how companies organize knowledge work. I also believe that Communities of Practice and an open, collaborative approach will be very important.

What’s going on at IBM? How does it treat this concept of Virtual Communities of Practice?

NEUS: Communities of Practice are highly encouraged and supported by many different tools and processes at IBM. There are hundreds of forums, like Usenet Newsgroups, for topical discussion. There are thousands of "Teamrooms" and "Quickplaces" based on Lotus Notes, for collaboration, project management, and information exchange in teams. There is a global system for supporting practitioners in sharing documents and information. There’s Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging client, for one-to-one and group communication. I am also a member of what you can think of as a meta-community called “CommunityBuilders.” This is a community of professionals who have experience with building, structuring, and launching virtual communities.

In your writings, you’ve contrasted a traditional approach of dealing with information quality with an open, collaborative approach. Tell us more.

NEUS: Traditional knowledge management follows the old wisdom: “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” A more refined version of this notion is ”Brooks’ Law”, named after Frederick P. Brooks. He talks about the inherent (dis-)economics of coordinating the work of many contributors. He states that as the number of people (N) involved in a project rises, the work performed also scales with N, but the complexity of coordination and risk of mistakes rises as N squared. To achieve good quality, Brooks recommends a minimum of contributors: “Conceptual integrity dictates that design must proceed from one mind, or a small number of agreeing resonant minds.”

But during the 1990s, a new paradigm of collaboration emerged, which seems to violate—or maybe just ignore—Brooks’ Law. This new paradigm has become known as the Open Source Development Model and has brought about the creation of the successful free Linux operating system. The key to the success of the collaborative model is the lowered transaction cost for information due to the clever use of Internet technology.

So what does that mean for this concept of ‘a single mind's integrity?’ Is it more or less dead?

NEUS: I believe Brooks’ Law is not invalidated, but rather complemented, by Linus' Law. Think of Newton’s laws of Classical Mechanics: They are no longer considered complete in the sense that they accurately describe all phenomena. But as long as you stay well away from the speed of light, you don’t need the Relativity Theory or Quantum Physics to have a good description of what is going on. Brooks’ Law is still very useful, but it may not accurately describe all kinds of collaboration.

Can you predict what kinds of software will catch on in businesses for collaboration?

NEUS: Let me start with the saying, “Predictions are always difficult, especially those concerning the future.” So my personal impressions should be taken with some salt. I believe tools to support collaboration will see much more use in the coming years, as knowledge sharing between practitioners becomes more widely recognized as a strategic differentiator.

Today, tools like e-mail and databases are used mostly to speed up traditional processes, without changing the (sometimes ancient) processes themselves. For example, a database for storing and retrieving documents can be thought of as a better library. E-Mail can be viewed as a better fax or memo. But it is still a 1-to-1 or 1-to-n communication tool like its predecessors. While speeding up established communication processes, these tools do not push the envelope of how we think about collaboration.

Newsgroups, Instant Messaging, Teamrooms and Wikis, do change the way we think about collaboration. They introduce a new kind of m-to-n communication. A Wiki can serve as a petri dish for a community to collaboratively develop information using an evolutionary paradigm. This idea of evolving rather than constructing knowledge changes the way we think about collaboration and knowledge management. And changes in our perceptions can be a powerful force. To quote Victor Hugo: “You can resist an invading army, but you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.”